Swearing
Published by Rick on Wednesday, September 03, 2008.George Orwell, the author, writing about swearing in the 1930s:
Swear-words change, or at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word bloody. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says bloody, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear-word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is [fucking]. No doubt in time [fucking], like bloody, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic – indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret – usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear-word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear-word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example [fuck]. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with [bugger], which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar instances in French for example [foutre], which is now a quite meaningless expletive.
The word [bougre], also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule seems to be that words accepted as swear-words have some magical character, which sets them apart and makes them useless for ordinary conversation.
Words used as insults seem to be governed by the same paradox as swear-words. A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is bastard – which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst insult to a woman, either in London or Paris, is cow; a name which might even be a compliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals. Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning; words, especially swear-words, being what public opinion chooses to make them. In this connexion it is interesting to see how a swear-word can change character by crossing a frontier. In England you can print Je m’en fous without protest from anybody. In France you have to print it Je m’en f—. Or, as another example, take the word barnshoot – a corruption of the Hindustani word bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of Aristophanes’ plays, and the annotator suggested it as a rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what bahinchut meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.
One other thing is noticeable about swearing in London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.
Swear-words change, or at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word bloody. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says bloody, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear-word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is [fucking]. No doubt in time [fucking], like bloody, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word.
The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic – indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret – usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear-word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear-word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example [fuck]. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with [bugger], which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar instances in French for example [foutre], which is now a quite meaningless expletive.
The word [bougre], also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule seems to be that words accepted as swear-words have some magical character, which sets them apart and makes them useless for ordinary conversation.
Words used as insults seem to be governed by the same paradox as swear-words. A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, because it means something bad; but in practice its insult-value has little to do with its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is bastard – which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst insult to a woman, either in London or Paris, is cow; a name which might even be a compliment, for cows are among the most likeable of animals. Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meant as an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning; words, especially swear-words, being what public opinion chooses to make them. In this connexion it is interesting to see how a swear-word can change character by crossing a frontier. In England you can print Je m’en fous without protest from anybody. In France you have to print it Je m’en f—. Or, as another example, take the word barnshoot – a corruption of the Hindustani word bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult in India, this word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I have even seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of Aristophanes’ plays, and the annotator suggested it as a rendering of some gibberish spoken by a Persian ambassador. Presumably the annotator knew what bahinchut meant. But, because it was a foreign word, it had lost its magical swear-word quality and could be printed.
One other thing is noticeable about swearing in London, and that is that the men do not usually swear in front of the women. In Paris it is quite different. A Parisian workman may prefer to suppress an oath in front of a woman, but he is not at all scrupulous about it, and the women themselves swear freely. The Londoners are more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.
From Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell's semi-autobiographical account of living in poverty in both cities, first published in 1933. In the original published text, Orwell replaced the words in square brackets with dashes - with not even an initial letter to give a clue - to give the novelty of a discussion on swear-words without identifying the particular swear-words being discussed. George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair who published under his assumed name to avoid embarrassing his family with the account of his life that he describes in Down and Out in Paris and London. Blair left the final choice of his pseudonym to his agent and his publisher, giving them the alternatives P. S. Burton (a name he used when he was a vagrant), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways.
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